I had some sort of black and white screen Garmin handheld back in the early 90s. You would have to plot the location it gave you on a map to see where you were. I would get maps from Industry Canada for 250k:1 and 50k:1 of the areas I wanted to backpack in, and carry them with me. Worked well, I didn’t get lost I guess, but there was also a lot of dead reckoning when the GPS couldn’t get enough satellites to work.

Yes. I was prepared though, I had directions from Mapquest printed out and ready to go in case it messed up. I was using an early-gen Garmin GPS that was just a GPS. It did mess up quite a bit, and I had to take it inside, plug it into my computer to update maps. It also could only hold so much, so I had to limit the maps I had available to just my city.

I’m 37, and yes. Along with the laptop I took to college in 2007, I bought a copy of Microsoft Streets & Trips that came with a USB GPS receiver. The software itself worked fairly well, the GPS receiver worked badly twice and then completely gave up. Used that software for several years to print maps and directions on paper to refer to on the road until Google Maps surpassed it.

I don’t make the cut since I’m 33 but I remember being 10 and my dad had a directional only GPS where you could put down coordinates of a place and get the direction needed to go towards it.

I had the GPS and my dad was winging it without a map and me asked his friend if it’s left or right and I said the GPS pointed to the right or whatever when they would he guessed left. They went for it and I navigated couple of roads and found a shorter path.

It’s a pretty nice memory I have of my dad which passed away 8 years ago. Thanks for reminding me

Yeah, it was one of these when I was in the army: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_Lightweight_GPS_Receiver

This didn’t necessarily precede civilian GPS devices, but this was during the accuracy “embargo.” Certainly though, GPS devices available to the public were cost prohibitive at that time. Later, someone bought me a Garmin for because they thought it would be useful to me in the military. I didn’t have the heart to tell them I’d never need it because of the existence of very accurate military GPS devices. It was a very thoughtful gift from a family member who was a veteran

A friend of mine insisted on bringing a GPS for our bicycle trip through Europe.

From the beginning, the GPS took center stage.
At every fork in the road, instead of broadly riding in the right direction, we had to stop so he could determine which was the correct path on the tiny black-and-white display.
And half the time, he was wrong. The punch line came when a bike path he found on his device turned out to be a stair going up a 200m high hill. Took us 2 hours to get up there cause we first had to carry our bikes up, then our luggage.

The first half of the trip he spent hours trouble-shooting the connector he had built himself to keep the GPS batteries charged off the hub dynamo.
The second half of the trip we had to book camp-sites or hostels most of the time, instead of just sleeping under the stars, because the charger still didn’t work, but THE DEVICE NEEDS POWER.

tl/dr: it sucked a lot of fun out of the trip. And it made me avoid all electronics on bicycle trips ever since.

Now when I ride, my phone stays in my pocket (for emergencies). I navigate by the sun when it’s shining and a compass otherwise.
At the end of the day, I’ll look at a paper map to see if I’m broadly in the right place and to plan the next day.
The only time I’ll use my phone to navigate is when the bike breaks down or I run out of water, to find the quickest way to get help.

Yes. I took a trip to Ireland and rented a car. I had a Garmin GPS unit which I purchased for the trip and was extremely helpful.

I remember the first time I saw GPS units at the electronics store. It seemed like some crazy military grade thing from a movie.

Yes, in 2003 on a cheap-ish pocket PC running a version of windows that felt like a mix of 95 and 3.11. Think smartphone without the phone feature

I remember shitting on a friend 3ndlessly for his dependency on his Garmin style GPS. The go to was that he couldn’t find his own dick with out his GPS. One day it’s just the two of us coming back from the city. He’s yelling at me to use the GPS as I was the passenger but being the asshole I am refused to turn it on and told him if he cant find the two turns to get on the expressway than we weren’t meant to go home. We’ll fuck me if he didn’t fuck up missing every on ramp which then led to him trying to just stay under the overpasses hoping to run into another on ramp. Finally I decided to fold and give him directions when he actually turns onto the walking path that takes pedestrians along the water front 🤣🤣🤣 fucking worth every minute we wasted. Motherfucker could lift a ton, but was too dumb to spell it.🤣

First time I used a Garmin device to mark where we dropped crab pots in the Puget Sound. Saved a lot of time hunting for our buoys.

Used GPS on boats as early as the late 1980’s, back when selective availability was still a thing. For those unfamiliar with it, GPS was initially military-only, and when they allowed civilian use they were concerned that US adversaries could use it for precision attacks. So SA was included in the civilian version, which introduced a random error of up to something like 1000 yards.

The truly ironic thing is that the US Coast Guard (a branch of the very military that created SA) saw the usefulness of GOS for marine navigation, but only if SA was removed. 1000 yards could easily mean the difference between a boat running aground (or worse) or not.

So the USCG built ground stations that would receive GPS signals, calculate the SA error, and broadcast a fixed signal. That was called Differential GPS, or DGPS. Boaters could buy special DGPS receivers for years, which were as accurate as GPS without the SA error.

Eventually the military was convinced to do away with SA entirely so DGPS was retired. It was only after that happened that GPS became globally useful for car, hiking, etc. navigation.

I did pizza delivery for years without GPS.

We had a really early one in the 90s, like way earlier than anyone else we knew, in a car we bought from some rich guy. We only used it once or twice as a novelty as my Dad always insisted he knew better. Plus it had its maps loaded up using some CD which was really out of date and it wasn’t like you could type in McDonalds and it would take you to the closest one, you had to put the whole address in and even then I think it wouldn’t find it half the time.

The first one I got was a gift in the 00s and it was bloody awful. Once I t turned me off a perfectly straight road to drive through a graveyard and then put me back on the road I had been on. Another time it turned me off and sent me down the only toll-road in the UK, then got me off at the first exit and put me back on the toll-road in the opposite direction to get me off at the place I’d got into it earlier. I had to pay twice to go nowhere and it added five minutes to my journey.

Just to add, when people came round our house in the late 90s my Dad would make me turn on the computer to show them MS Autoroute, which was an offline piece of software that was used to generate routes, basically what Google Maps does now with directions, but it would just give you something to print out. Really useful for the day and you could even get it to estimate how much the fuel would cost, etc.

I remember being really amazed that I could stand in place and turn around and see my arrow on google maps turn with me. It seemed crazy it had that much precision.

On my first smart phone ca. 2014, I had Here Maps (a Nokia product I think?). I didn’t have any data plan, and that mapping service didn’t require it. I don’t think I ever used it, but that may be the first. Otherwise, earlier this year I used my work phone and whatever it has for navigation. I hated it 😅 I clearly liked knowing directions more then one turn out.